NEVER SAY NEVER

Never say never, was never so true. As a genealogist, I always stay hopeful of finding lost relatives and friends, but I am realistic. I realize it can be challenging to go back many years when searching Jewish family records in Eastern Europe.

With such common family names as Pollack, Friedman, and Cohen, and limited archival records of Jews in the old country, I was shocked when miraculously, I was able to go back to the mid-1700s in one family’s history. Note, there may be various spellings of names and places.

After finding the family of a friend/landsman with the family name Moskowitz in the Chudnov Children Facebook group (see blog post Opening the gates for Chudnov Children, dated July 13, 2021), on a whim, I posted a question on the Facebook group, Tracing the Tribe on 6-16-2021:

“My husband's maternal grandfather came to the U.S. from Kobryn about 1899. He was married twice and had one son from each union. Then, in America, he married again in Nov. 1900. Those marriage records have him listed as Morris Polack with one L. He was living at 166 Forsythe St. in N.Y. His sons from the previous marriages both came to America. One was Samuel Benny Pollack (WWI U.S. veteran) and the other was Duvid (David) Pollack. I have not been able to find any of their records showing them on a ship. Also, Morris's father Lazer Pollack was living with Morris and his wife at 13-15 Ludlow St. in N.Y. according to the 1905 N.Y. census. I cannot find him on ship records either. The 1920 and 1930 census show Morris living in Linden, NJ., where my mother-in-law, his youngest child, was born in 1918. I am close with the entire family and have all the information except for the ship manifests. Any help would be appreciated. In over thirty years of research, I have tried all different spellings but no success.”

To my total surprise and delight, Elise Friedman (no relation to me on the Friedman side, shucks) answered the request with a suggestion that I send her a private message. When I did, Elise said she thought she could be related based on a family tree that she and her cousin Hariette had paid a researcher to document. Elise and Hariette are second cousins to each other.

Elise asked me to supply the names of any siblings of Morris and any other relatives. I told her about Morris's father having lived in America. His death records include the names of Morris's grandparents, my husband’s great-great-grandparents. Elise got back to me later that day with the startling fact that my husband is her fifth cousin once removed. She had his family tree back eight generations to the mid-1700s, starting with Iosel Pollack.

When Elise sent me the link to the entire Pollack family tree back so many generations, all the information panned out. While Morris’s name is not on the list, his sister Hannah Rochel is, as well as their father Leiser and his father Benjamin, whom I already had documented.

We figured that Morris was married by then and out of the house. It was a lucky thing I had the information about Morris’s sister, my mother-in-law’s aunt, and had been to the cemetery where she and her husband remain interred, in Chicago.

Our grandchildren now go back ten generations on this side of their family roots. Informatively, Elise explained that the only reason they could trace the Pollack ancestors back to the mid-1700s was that the family had moved to Kobrin.

A revisionist list documented between 1889 and 1891 registered anyone who moved into Kobrin, Belarus. Lucky for us, the Pollacks were among the residents of Kobrin, having moved from the shtetl Horodetz.

Drohitzen, Belarus, was also noted in the documents. And, Morris’s sister Hannah Rochel is interred in the Drohitzen Section of the cemetery.

As an added bonus, Elise tracked when and where my husband’s maternal grandfather, Morris Pollack, arrived in America. The manifest shows he traveled by ship with his father, Leiser.

They came from Kobrin, and the reason I could never find them registered onboard a vessel at ellisislandrecords.org was that no one ever told me they sailed to Quebec, Canada. That was in 1899, the same year my husband’s maternal grandmother arrived at Ellis Island from Slonim, Belarus. His maternal grandparents married in 1900 in New York City. The rest, as they say, is history...family history.

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One of the top reasons for writing Kitchen Talk: Sharing Family Tales was to bring the family to life by recording stories to go with the names. Our generation and their descendants will have the information to share the legacies of all the relatives I could muster up tales about or personally remember.

The true wonder is, with how many generations of their family tree were Morris Pollack and his sister acquainted? Did they know about the ancestors as far back as their grandfather Benjamin's great-grandfather Iosel? Why were their descendants not clued in about more generations of their roots? 

Did the ancestors of our children spend family time with those of Elise’s and Hariette’s? Perhaps after this is all shared, the bulk of the descendants of Iosel Polyak will become acquainted. How special that would be.

Sister of Morris Pollack interred in the Drohitchen section of Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park, IL

And this is how our connection to Iosel Polyak born before 1750 was discovered